Generally, a home appliance is usually equipped with a control panel or plural control buttons. The user may operate the control panel or the control buttons to control the home appliance. As known, there are certain distances between the locations of some home appliances and the user's location. For example, the air conditioner is located at a higher altitude or the television set is far away from the sofa, and so on. For facilitating the user to control the home appliance, the manufacturer usually designs an exclusive remote controller for the home appliance. By using the remote controller, the user can control the home appliance at a remote site.
However, the control panels or the control buttons of the remote controllers designed by different manufacturers are not always identical. Moreover, the control panel layout or the control button layout is usually restricted by the volume of the remote controller. In other words, the utilization of the remote controller is limited. Moreover, if the manufacturer finds that the layout of the remote controller is no longer popular, the manufacturer is usually unwilling to design and produce a more user-friendly remote controller because the cost of producing the new remote controller is high. Until the next generation home appliance is about to be introduced to the market, the remote controller with the new layout is correspondingly produced so as to achieve the cost-effective benefit. Since this approach of designing the new remote controller takes a certain time period, the user does not want to wait but prefers selecting the home appliances of other manufacturers. Under this circumstance, the customer loss rate increases.
Recently, with increasing development of science and technology, home appliances and other electronic devices have evolved to the intelligent appliances. In particular, most home appliances have a network connection function and can be used with portable electronic devices. For example, in case that an air conditioner in a house has the network connection function, the air conditioner can be connected with the user's smart phone through network connection. If an exclusive application program for the air conditioner is installed in the smart phone, the user may operate the application program of the smart phone to control the operations of the air conditioner through network transmission. For example, if the air conditioner is turned on in advance before the user comes back to the house, the pre-cooling efficacy is achieved. Under this circumstance, the user can control the home appliance without the need of using the exclusive remote controller.
However, the above control method still has some drawbacks. For example, if the user wants to operate the smart phone to control the television set, the user has to previously download and the application program for the television set. Similarly, if the user wants to operate the smart phone to control the air conditioner, the user has to previously download and the application program for the air conditioner. In other words, the number of home appliances that are controlled by the smart phone is dependent on the same number of application programs installed on the smart phone. It is time-consuming and labor-intensive for the user to sequentially download many application programs. Moreover, for implementing the above control method, the controlled home appliances should have the network connection function.
Therefore, there is a need of providing a control system for controlling plural passive devices without the need of previously installing many application programs for the passive devices.